srochford

Err; that's kind of the idea! You might as well say [insert name of virus scanner] is useless because it blocks bad programs!!

did anyone actually read the article? It says: - ie the BBC article clearly recognises that you don't need to physically destroy the disc, you can just use software to clear the drive completely. they do go on to show that smashing the disc does make the data unrecoverable (it does!) but they don't claim that you need to do that.

What sort of machine are you going to benchmark it against? Given that it has an Atom CPU, it's not going to score well against an HP DC7900 with quad core!

Why don't you just put a check box form field on the page? I don't have Word 2003 at the moment but this looks like the right info for doing it No macros to worry about and it just works as users (hopefully!!) expect.

Not sure how to install the Telnet client which comes with Vista - I'm sure it'll be one of those "rundll32" commands but I can't find the details. An alternative would be to just use putty - this doesn't need installing; just copy it to the machine and add a shortcut to the start menu (or leave it on a server and add the shortcut) Putty is a client which can do telnet but can also do SSH and is free :-)

In earlier operating systems it could cause problems in schools and such like - it only needs one kid to find out how to do "net send" (or to download something which uses the messenger/alerter service) and you can have chaos. Vista and Server 2008 changed the way services interact with the desktop - if you have UAC control turned on then anything which is not running as "you" (and that includes most services) can't just "do stuff" on your screen - it has to pop up a message saying "application X wants your attention" You then get to see what it has to say and you can OK etc. This makes it much, much harder to have something doing a trivial pop up on the screen. What are you trying to do? Would some kind of instant messaging be easier?

The ultra small DC7800 (and the DC7900 its successor) both have external power supplies but the "small form factor" have internal PSUs The "small" HP machines are bigger than the Viglen but look fine under a monitor on a desk. A possible benefit of this HP is that the optical drive is standard size which makes it a bit more robust although the ultra small also uses a laptop type drive.

When you say explorer crashes do you mean it quits or freezes? If it freezes, then kill it with task manager and let it upload the report to Microsoft - you may well get useful info back. this typically happens because something registered as a right click handler is broken. I've had it happen recently with ffdshow.ax (I think; it was certainly a codec file) If you don't get useful info back from MS, what have your recently installed that could have added to the right click handlers?

"raising awareness" is probably a good thing but what actually happens? What is anyone more aware of now than they were before? That cancer exists? That cancer can affect young people? That cancer can be fatal? I'd very much like there to be some focus on how we can prevent cervical cancer. How many of the people calling for awareness raising are aware of the HPV vaccination (which can help prevent it)? How many of those people were actually arguing against the use of it? Cervical cancer generally affects older women; it's pretty rare in someone so young. There will no doubt be calls for screening to be brought in for younger women. This isn't necessarily a good thing - what appear to be abnormalities can be detected which cause needless worry but turn out to be false alarms - and it will also divert money from possibly more important NHS work.

sc is better if you want to script it (eg collecting info from a batch of machines); msinfo is better if you need a GUI Might be worth mentioning that pretty much all the MMC windows can be exported (eg Start | Run | Services.msc. right click on "services" on the left hand side and choose Export list. Finally (!) don't forget Scriptomatic which will write a WMI script for you to export details of services and many more things besides.

As kmount says, you can do that with autorun.inf but it does depend on the user having configured USB sticks to process autorun.inf There's some info on the Microsoft web site about how you can disable autorun - I'd guess you just do the opposite to enable it

I think this is sensible - you work out what's "business critical" and you get that up and running critically. Realistically, it's very rare that *everything* get's destroyed. What's more likely is much smaller scale disaster - one server bursts into flames, for example. In this case it's possible to have a recovery plan which will get you going much more quickly. If you have your servers as VMs then you can pretty quickly stick them on new hardware (assuming you have more than one box that can host them). If you don't have such a box you could probably get something that would to at your local PC World etc (you quite possibly have a desktop you could purloin for a few days if it's really critical)

There are plenty of them around - you just have to pay for them :-) Janet has a co-location facility available which is pretty cheap but I'm not sure if it's available to schools. There are plenty of companies in docklands that will house stuff for you but I've no idea how expensive it would be. the simplest and cheapest thing would be to negotiate with a neighbouring school so that you have some space available there in which you keep your VMs etc

Your school ought to have a disaster recovery plan in place with details of who would do what in the event of disaster. This will cover not just IT but everything that might need to be done. it might be that if fire destroyed the whole school you'd simply abandon it and start again but it would certainly be useful to have data backed up somewhere off site. You can see our code of practice here and there's a useful document here on how to start planning what you do in the event of disaster. You almost certainly can't think of everything that could go wrong but you can think of general stuff and then look at individual services and how you would restore them and then think about which are the most important (and this needs to be done in negotiation with others), which depend on other things and so on. ITIL has some good stuff to say about this - eg a quick google found this which also might give you some ideas.

I'm not really going to defend the BBC's action but given the seriousness of the problems caused by botnets, do you not think that news organisations should be making massive efforts to educate the general public about the risks to which they are exposed? Running their own botnet might not be the best idea but setting up a simulation in a studio is pointless - people would look at it and say "that's not real" (because it obviously wouldn't be). This is very real and it might just make a few people think "How do I make my computer secure"

You can generally read this info using WMI. The Microsoft Scriptomatic tool will write scripts for you to get this (and much, much more info) If you're interested in scripting then this is a really good way to get a start with some useful sample scripts.

Good to see you've got it working. Just one small point - WSUS doesn't push anything - it's a completely "pull" technology. The server pulls updates from the MS web site and stores them. Clients then "pull" a list of updates from the WSUS server, check for what they need, pull those updates and then notify the server of what they've done. the point about sysprepping is a bit of a red herring; you do need to sysprep machines before imaging but that doesn't fix the WSUS ID (although there's nothing to stop you adding the commands that @fn-gm has posted to cmdlines.txt in sysprep so that it gets cleaned up)

What is that registry key? I can't find the GUID. If you look at the InprocServer32 value it should be pointing to an EXE file or DLL and that might give you a clue what's going on. As Michael says, can you install it manually logged on as admin - that might rule out permissions issues. The installer service will run as the local computer account during a GPO install and it might be that this account doesn't have rights to that key (although generally, the computer account has rights to everything on the local machine!)

Not sure I understand what's going on. Is this just with Chinese (or similar south east Asian names)? Normal practice as I understand it is that their names are "back to front" (so instead of "Steve Rochford" they do "Rochford Steve") and also they often have a Western name which they use as a given name. For example, with the name Wen Jiabao, "Wen" is the family name and Jiabao is the "first name" (probably better referred to as the given name). I don't think he uses a Western name but let's say that it's Jim. I'm guessing that the data for him would be stored as "Wen" in Surname and "Jim" in preferred first name and "F.F. John" in firstname? When reports etc are generated, I imagine that they're all done using the surname and preferred firstname fields? If this is the case then generated reports are going to be correct. If it's always "F.F. John" in the "wrong" records then essentially that is just being used as a placeholder - it would make more sense to put "not available" or similar but that's what it's standing for. If I've understood all this then I don't think there's a problem from the DPA angle - you're not deliberately (or accidentally) storing wrong information; you're saying that for these people there isn't a name you want to use there. Provided that is true then I don't think there's a problem but I can't see why you wouldn't put the Chinese first name in there (assuming that you know it) - it will be useful for anything which needs the full name showing in the future.

That company name always makes me smile; what if I want to know the time of the last bus to see if I can get home from the pub? Do I need the last bus site :-)

If I understand what you're trying to do, you need to use DCOUNT Give your data range a name (makes the formula easier!), put the criterion you're using in a pair of cells with the field name on top, value underneath (eg cells E1 and E2): Name Peter Enter a formula: =dcount(datatable, 2,e1:e2) - this says count the cells in field 2 of datatable which have a number in them and where the value in "name" is "peter" If you want to count for name=peter and data=2 then you extend the criterion range: Name Data Peter 2 and your formula becomes =dcount(datatable, 2,e1:f2) Not sure what you're doing but this might be getting to the point where it would be easier to do with Access or other database. Excel is good but querying data like this is better done with the proper tool :-)

The trouble with any kind of blacklist is keeping it up to date. I'd guess you could spend your evenings doing research surfing for porn in order to build a blacklist but it really will make you go blind :-)

Is this just a case of where she's telling you half the story - ie she's got the original photos, she's scanned and printed them but they came out black and white (on a black and white laser printer). Now what she would like is to take the original photos and copy them in colour. Trouble is that she's not said that so she's not going to make much progress :-)

This technet article shows how you can use Group Policy to block access to encryption (or control it, should you wish to use it on some computers)

it may not matter - it depends on what that GUID refers to (and normally googling can find commong DCOM object guids but that draws a blank so I'm not sure if it's important or not) if you run up dcomcnfg then you'll get a list of all the objects. Go to console root | component services | computers | my computer | DCOM Config and look at the list. Some have names; some have GUIDS (at the bottom). Can you find the GUID? If so, look at the properties. There should be a service name on it which might give a clue what it does. If you think that needs remote launch permission then you can give this on the security tab If you can't find the GUID there, then look in regedit - that might give you a name for this object; you can then go back to the DCOM Config, find that name and again check the properties.